Hometown advantage: On the scene in Montreal for Georges St-Pierre's return

When trying to gauge the enthusiasm level of the crowd at a UFC event, I find it’s helpful to measure the reaction by what I like to call “The Buffer Index.” It’s not exactly scientific, but what it lacks in technical expertise it more than makes up for in pure simplicity.

It all boils down to how much of Bruce Buffer’s pre-fight introductions you can actually hear over the noise of the crowd before the main event. If you can hear it all, that’s zero Buffers. Every other word? Half a Buffer. Almost none at all? That’s your rare Full Buffer. Personally, I’ve witnessed only a few Full Buffers. When Anderson Silva fought at UFC 134 in Rio, that was one. Randy Couture’s return to Portland, Ore., at UFC 102 was another.

But Georges St-Pierre in Montreal almost necessitates a new Buffer ratings system. There was the venerable UFC announcer, screaming into a microphone until his face changed colors, and you could barely make out the words over the din of the crowd at Bell Centre on Saturday night. Good thing we all know that spiel by heart at this point.

To say that they love them some GSP in Montreal would be an understatement. When I first saw men on the street hawking “GSP headbands” – you know, the “Karate Kid”-looking ones – outside the weigh-ins, I thought someone had come up with a pretty sorry business plan. Then I saw how many people were coming up to buy them, and how many were wearing them in the crowd at UFC 154.

Partly that’s because, as one Canadian fight fan I spoke to put it, seeing St-Pierre in Montreal is a “bucket list” kind of event. But it probably also didn’t hurt that this particular fight week found the city of Montreal in a real sporting crisis. As you may have heard, it’s about the NHL. More accurately, it’s about the lack of the NHL so far this season, as owners and players try to come to some multi-million dollar understanding with one another. In the meantime, Canada is without its hockey, and that’s a sorry sight. It’s like seeing a cat wear pants. It just feels so unnatural.

I got as far as the customs inspector at the Montreal airport before I heard about it. All it took was me explaining that I was here for work, and that my work was the business of sports journalism, and I got a pitying look from the man in the little glass booth.

“But there can’t be much to write about now, can there?” he said. It took me a minute to realize he meant the hockey. As if the star that the entire sporting universe rotated around had shriveled and died.

In the downtown bars of Montreal they were making the best of it. Everywhere I went had old classic games on replay, usually ones with lots of bench-clearing brawls. You get the sense that this will placate them for only so long, however. That’s where the UFC comes in. When it comes to town with GSP in the main event, it seems like you never stop seeing him on TV or overhearing his name stuck in among a stream of French words in the conversation a couple barstools over. In the U.S., he’s one of the few fighters that even non-MMA fans might know. In Canada, he’s nothing short of a superstar.

That’s why it was something of a disappointment for the fans here not to get the full arena weigh-in treatment. Instead of getting fighters on the scales at the Bell Centre, the UFC settled for a downtown nightclub, complete with a “kiddy tent” outside, since the city wouldn’t allow children inside the club even when it wasn’t operating in its usual alcohol-serving, debauchery-inducing capacity. It’s probably just as well. Ever been to a nightclub in the middle of the afternoon? And sober? I don’t recommend it. Something about the afternoon light strips away the mystery. You realize it’s basically a warehouse where people go to pretend they’re someone else, someone glamorous.

Turns out it was all Bob Dylan’s fault, as usual. He was playing the Bell Centre on Friday night, and apparently he wasn’t keen on having the UFC and its fans crowd the place on Friday afternoon. And who can argue with him? It’s Bob freaking Dylan. Dana White might think he’s been at this live event production stuff a long time, but he’s got several more decades to go if he wants to catch up to Dylan.

Before the weigh-ins, we were treated to a fan Q&A with Rory MacDonald, who showed up in a dapper topcoat and tie, looking like an extra on “Mad Men.” Fashion sense aside, he made it clear right away that he intended to take no crap off nobody. When a fan asked if he would hold B.J. Penn down in their fight “like GSP did,” MacDonald didn’t flinch.

“Have you ever seen me hold someone down?” he shot back. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you shut down a smartass with a microphone.

From there, the questions got noticeably less combative. MacDonald was asked about his favorite strip club (he prefers “regular” clubs and “regular” girls, he said), why he called out Penn in the first place (he didn’t, he insisted, and he had even less patience for the question the second time it was asked), and, of course, the best question of the afternoon: “Where’d you get them socks?”

For the UFC’s future reference, the sock question is probably the best sign that it’s time to call an end to the fan Q&A. When we start inquiring about “them socks,” we’ve officially run out of things to talk about.

Once MacDonald was off the stage, I headed out to the kiddie tent, where I found Dan Hardy posing for pictures and signing autographs. With all he knew about both St-Pierre and Carlos Condit, I asked, what was his assessment of the main event?

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, and I tried not to show that I had no idea what he meant. I don’t think I succeeded, so he explained it to me. It was, he said, all about the way GSP and Condit fit together. One could do exactly what the other couldn’t, and vice versa.

“Condit, he waits for you to make a mistake and then he exploits it,” Hardy said. St-Pierre, on the other hand, was more likely to dominate you from start to finish. With Condit’s style and finishing ability, Hardy warned, he could afford to get dominated for almost the entire fight, “because he can always end the fight at any moment.”

At the time, I thought this sounded like a pretty savvy analysis. It would seem downright prescient before Saturday night was over.

The thing you realize when you see it in action is that having the hometown crowd behind you really is an advantage, but not the way some people might think. You know the cliche the visiting fighter always tosses out to make himself feel better about having an arena full of people against him? Usually it’s something along the lines of, ‘Well, they can’t get in the cage with him,’ which is physically true, but misses the point entirely.

The real advantage of the crowd support is that it makes everything the hometown fighter does seem that much more meaningful. When Condit and GSP exchanged blows on the feet, the crowd had a way of muting Condit’s strikes and amplifying GSP’s. Condit could land a stiff punch that left a visible welt on St-Pierre’s face, and nothing. GSP landed a jab and the place went nuts. Same when he scored a takedown, or moved to half-guard, or simply dragged Condit back down after he attempted to get to his feet. You can tell yourself that this sort of thing doesn’t affect the judges, but only if you’ve never seen MMA judges at work. These are the same people who can’t seem to remember past the last 30 seconds of each round. Trust me, the crowd reaction can completely alter their perception.

But then, on this night it didn’t need to. St-Pierre made it obvious that he was the better fighter, and he even gave his fans a dose of that peculiar sort of thrilling dread when he went down to a Condit head kick before eventually recovering and getting right back to work, only now with a misshapen skull. By the time the fight was over, he said at the post-fight press conference, his head resembled an “American football.”

He said this with a smile on his face, of course, seeing as how he was the victor, sitting there at nearly 3 a.m. in a back room of the Bell Centre, where the walls were covered with paintings and photographs of the great Montreal Canadiens players who had been making buildings like this one shake with thunderous cheers for decades. They might not be doing so just now, thanks to their forced hiatus, but at least they still had GSP. At least there were now several thousand more fans who could shuffle off into the early morning dark thinking about how one day they’d be able to tell their grandchildren about seeing the great St-Pierre defend his title in Montreal.

As the UFC 189 tour made its last stop in Dublin, featherweight champ Jose Aldo was met with a torrent of abuse from the Irish fans. It might have been unpleasant, but it might also have been just what he needed.